What?!?
Unbelievably ungrateful. It’s an excellent gift. There’s something for the kids to appreciate now (and a seven-year-old can have a hard time with the concept of delayed gratification) and shit–SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS into the college fund each year? They are damn lucky, even if they won’t fully appreciate it until later.
Yes. Ungrateful.
Leaving aside your opinion on the matter, I think the grandparents are pretty wise for a couple of reasons.
- Most “toys” are usually dumped and forgotten in short order - or do you still listen to your Walkman? Even for adults, I could find a fun gift for about $15 that would entertain for a few hours.
- Those couple of hundred dollars per year add up quickly, along with interest. Even if this doesn’t pay for tuition, it will pay for books and other expenses.
- Psychologically, once the kid is in high school and realizes they have a couple thousand dollars waiting for college, they might be more inclined to start thinking about college and maybe work towards adding to that fund. Most importantly, it shows someone was planning and caring about their future.
Not an ungrateful shit. The way you did it in your family was your way. It depends totally on the way gift-giving went in your family - kids sometimes do depend on that cash for that nice outfit they wanted to buy or whatever, and grandparents might prefer to give more for a tangential gift.
But your partner’s family do also have a sensible way of doing things - enough to get the kid a present to unwrap, plus a contribution towards something more. Both ways work.
ETA: I think there should be a note dropped in ‘[whatever sum of money] towards your college fund.’ It’s nice for the kids to know that their grandparents are paying into that.
The kids may not appreciate it much, but the practice just reinforces that EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT, and that’s something that can’t be drilled into skulls hard enough. If you give the kids the impression that YOU think it’s a crappy idea, then you’re just kind of undermining the whole thing, in which case don’t bother with an education fund.
A gift into a college fund is not a gift to the parents, but a gift to the child.
Well, for what it’s worth, education was always a priority in my family, I was always expected to not only go to college but graduate, and my parents always expected to pay for college, which is both why it would have essentially been a gift to my parents, and I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much, because I’d never have seen a dime of that money in any event. Sort of a gift that’s not really a gift, if you see where I’m coming from.
It’s in the same vein in my mind as giving plain boring socks as a gift to a kid whose parents aren’t struggling financially. It’s just not something the kid wants, and all the socks would do is save the parents from having to buy another set eventually.
I can see how if education wasn’t a priority, or the parents didn’t expect to pay for college, then the money would have been more appreciated by a child.
And I did get savings bonds for various occasions- I did appreciate those, especially when I was unemployed at one point and redeemed some.
As it is, I just see the niece and nephew as simply being polite when they get a $15 gift on their birthday, and aunts, uncles and the other grandparents give more traditional gifts of somewhat larger value.
It sounds like a good gift, if they can ensure that the parents don’t steal it in the meantime. Most of the adults in my family, though, are opportunistic, selfish little shits. Giving such a present would be most unwise in my family. If it works for you, cool. I honestly think opening a trust fund that the kid’s parents have no access to is a better idea.
And college funds are a wonderful Christmas present.
Maybe your niece and nephew have been raised not to perform monetary analysis on all gifts before deciding whether or not to be appreciative of them.
You know maybe their parents don’t want their kids to be getting cash and expensive gifts from their grandparents? My brother told me once that my nephew already has more toys than he needs, he’s the first grandchild on both sides and has always had a house full of toys. If he wants a $40 game then his parents can just buy it for him as they see fit. It sounds like your parents couldn’t do that when you were growing up, but toys and electronics are cheaper now and you don’t really know the details of your siblings budgets and how they run their households. They may already have a family policy on allowance and spending money and don’t need or want grandma as an outside cash source.
I’d imagine many of the responses you are getting come from people whose parents where *not *expected to pay for college. Possibly because education was not valued. But probably because there was just not enough money. (Darn, my grandparents didn’t have any extra money, either.)
Great, you went to college. But you still have a lot to learn about how people really live.
Yeah, we understand your point, it’s just that none of agree with you and think this “analysis” sounds entitled and brattish.
Yeah, I agree. Get off your high horse. The fact that the grandparents are willing and have the financial means to help pay for their grandchildren’s education and secure a good future for them is the greatest gift they could have and worth more than any material present. And college 10 years from now (when they’re 17 and 19) is only going to be more expensive than it is in 1985 dollars or 2010 dollars. It could even make the difference to helping the kids become doctors or lawyers someday.
My parents gave my kids a token gift and money for their college funds for years. Its a generous thing for them to do.
When my kids want MONEY they have opportunities to earn it. From their parents, from their grandparents. Do your niece and nephew need to spend money? A lot of kids at that age don’t - their parents fund their reasonable wants. Do your niece and nephew have other sources of revenue? Mine get an allowance and are permitted other opportunities for making money if there is something they want. Even if they don’t have other sources of revenue and need the money - its a gift - not a grandparent shakedown.
My parents paid for college for my sister and me.
My grandparents never gave me any presents at all. Had they given me socks, I would probably have been pathetically grateful. Money for college? Yeah, I wouldn’t’ve appreciated it at the time, but my parents would have made darn sure that I appreciated it as time went on.
In fact… now that I think of it… my dad had some quasi-parental figures that we called “Grandma and Grandpa F.” even though we were not related to them at all. They sent us $10 for every birthday, and never sent us any toys at all. The money got put into a bank account that got liquidated for college funds when we went to college, so I never saw a cent of that money.
I didn’t appreciate it then, but my mom made me write a thank-you note every year, and I really, really appreciate it now as an adult with my own child – they didn’t have to do that, or even remember my birthday at all, and it was really sweet that they did. Awww, now I’m missing them!
Oh, and it sounds like you had pretty generous grandparents. My mother’s parents were not at all well off - and had eleven grandkids. We got $1 in a card. My father’s mother was just clueless - she usually went out and bought something gaudy, inappropriate and cheap. While I realized even as I kid that I was kinda getting the short end of the stick in loot from grandparents, it was a lesson in learning how to be gracious. Believe it or not, I didn’t suffer unduly from the lack of money in cards at Christmas.
You went to college in a very different era: the cost of 4 years of undergraduate tuition at a state school, nothing else, is about $40,000 now. It’s increased significantly faster than inflation over the last 20 years. God only knows what it will be in another decade. It’s quite reasonable to expect that even in a middle class or upper-middle class family, an enriched college fund could be the difference between having to take out loans or not, being able to go away to college or not, being able to start at a 4-year school or not, having to work all year or not.
Furthermore, among people that can readily afford to pay their child’s full shot, it’s not uncommon to allow the “extras” of college to come out of whatever money accumulated in the college fund (assuming it was gifts). I’ve known plenty of parents that looked at college fund money that way–it payed for things like study abroad, Greek fees, and sometimes graduate school.
And if my parents had ever caught me comparing the value of gifts from different sources, it would have been time for a Serious Conversation about Values. Hell, I hope my kid does get wildly different gifts so that we can have exactly that conversation: it’s a teachable moment.
You’d see the extra money when your parents die and you get your inheritance, so you see, it really *is *a gift to you.
At least that sounds like a reasonable argument for someone who scrutinizes the monetary value of gifts as closely as you seem to.
I see where you are coming from, but do not agree.
My grandparents did a lot to make college affordable for me and my brother (and my cousins). Or perhaps I should say, they did a lot to make the small, private, prestigious, residential college life more affordable.
And because my parents didn’t have to take out loans or work second jobs or eat dishcloth soup to make college affordable, they’ve been able to help out with post-college expenses. Like paying for the UHaul truck to move a child, or giving a generous wedding anniversary gift to my brother, so he had the ready cash for a water heater.
It may not always be obvious to the child where the money for minor luxuries like vacation or dinner out at a really nice restaurant comes from. But to suggest that the child gets no benefit out of gifts to their college fund, is generally incorrect.
College is really expensive these days. We have a small college fund for the kids that we contribute to monthly. My parents do the moderate gift + college fund contribution thing for my kids. My in-laws bought some stock on the kids’ behalf. My grandmother sent savings bonds for birthdays and Christmas. Between all of those sources, hopefully we’ll be able to afford to send the kids where they want to go, without too much consideration for what is “affordable.” Those gifts might make the difference between a college that’s a really good fit and a college that happens to be in state.
Besides, the kids have more than enough toys.